His continuing interest, with the help of his relative Leonid Mandelstam, in the advances in physics at that time aided in the formulation of his morphogenetic field theory, which Gurwitsch himself viewed throughout his life as no more than a suggestive hypothesis.

[2] During the next decade, Gurwitsch contributed a series of landmark papers arguing that the orientation and division of cells was random at local level but was rendered coherent by an overall field which obeyed the regular inverse square law – an enterprise that required extensive statistical analysis.

After the 1917 revolution, Gurwitsch fell upon hard times and accepted the chair of Histology at Taurida University, the chief seat of learning of the Crimean Peninsula, where he spent seven happy years.

[3] However the furore, which may have sparked Wilhelm Reich's similar Orgone experiments, brought Gurwitsch an international reputation that led to several European lecture tours.

He sought to redefine his "heretical" concept of the morphogenetic field in general essays, pointing to molecular interactions unexplained by chemistry.

Gurwitsch had been ahead of his time in his interest in the emergent properties of the embryo, but more modern self-organization theories (such as that of Ilya Prigogine) and treatments of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in living systems would show the extent to which the vectors he described can be generated without the assumption of an overarching field, so the search for a physical field was abandoned in favour of more neutral concepts like the paradigm of Systems Biology.

There has been a recent revival in field theories of life, albeit again at the fringes of science, particularly among those who seek to include an account of developmental psychobiology.

The influence of Gurwitsch's theory is particularly evident in the work of the British plant physiologist, Rupert Sheldrake, and his concept of "morphic resonance."